Last night I had a very vivid, strange dream. Perhaps it's a nightmare but it's not quite yet.
It started in a public park, with lots of fir trees. I was filming my little siblings--of which were my little siblings in the dream but were mere figments of my imagination--while they played with a large, beige-coloured rabbit with floppy ears. I was giggling and watching the Rec button beep and shine when the little girls were running and laughing, but I could hear my mother coming.
She didn't resemble my real mother at all.
She was a strange woman with bright brown eyes, curly hair, sallow skin. An overweight but not too plump woman, with plum coloured lips. When she went into the viewfinder scope the children ran out towards me, the rabbit forgotten momentarily as they cowered in my shadow, and I tensed. She took the rabbit and bashed its head into the trunk of the fir tree, grinning into the camera. "There, now we have dinner," she laughed, her ivory-brownish teeth showing, and my siblings crowded around my waist, for they were small and shivering and they did not say a word.
It was back at home and it was night. I sat on my bunk bed, where the second youngest--a brother--slept on top and the two younger girls slept with me. The littlest sister was crying, and I was shushing her, kissing her forehead, her cheeks, tickling her back into smiling. It was like my room back in Pettibone, the same house as Pettibone but outside the window was total darkness. I heard my mother calling and I turned to my siblings, telling them to lock the bedroom door after me. My feet dragged on the carpet as I entered her door, her shouts getting more loud and more abrasive with every step.
She was screaming for me to make dinner. She was sitting on the bed, lounging with a bored and conceited look, and she glared when I entered. In the bedroom was the cutting knife and cutting board, and our slain pet rabbit's pelt draped across the chair. The meat was pink and ribbony, clinging to the bones, and I couldn't tell what it was any more. I turned to the woman who was my mother and I spat at her through my gritted teeth, "Oh? Am I supposed to do this, too?"
And my aunt was in the room, too--well, the sister of the woman who was my mother, and she gave me a wary glance. My mother rose from where she lounged and gave me a menacing glare. We talked but the conversation is lost to me now. There was something about me being more of an adult than her, about how she always laid on the bed and relaxed while my siblings relied solely on me for all of everything. About how she cared for nothing, about nothing, nothing but herself, and she came at me with a killing intent.
Before she could grab the knife, I took it first, trying to keep it away from her hands. She thought I was going to cut her so she grabbed the knife's blade with her right hand, and her wild brown eyes widened when blood started gushing from her palm. She had slammed herself into the knife; her hand was open and cut.
The blood dripped onto the knife, onto my hands, everywhere on the floor. She didn't cry in pain, only flinching and grabbing her hand close to her breast and then turning her burning eyes to me. My aunt stood and said "Oh, my god!" and hurriedly grabbed my mother, beginning to bandage her hands. I uttered some stammered excuse about finding bandages, and left while dropping the knife on the floor, and ran to the kitchen.
I took the phone and clumsily tried dialling 911. In my dream I couldn't remember how to contact the police; I was going to call them to help her, and to save us, me and my sibling-children. I shakily staggered into the bathroom, locking it behind me, but I knew my aunt wouldn't be able to keep my mother away for long. I sank to a sitting position against the door, dialling some random numbers that I knew were not the police's number, but because I couldn't remember it in my shaking frenzy I dialled 12330.
And Lale's voice came over the phone.
"What you are seeking is not an escape, but a solution," he said to me in his smooth, velvet voice.
"Help me, please," I begged him.
"If you must, take the key, and lock the world," he murmured.
"I will."
"Take the key. It will lock everything for you."
And from the face of the telephone, I saw the handle of the black key--a thing that I drew a while ago, a key as black as night with a terrible lustre, with the head of the key in the shape of an eye. I pulled it out and it looked like a blade, and just as I described it in my story, it bubbled at the blade and new teeth came in, and I shoved it into the newly-opened keyhole in the door.
When I turned around, the bathroom was turning black. The mirror, the tub, the objects, everything was going dark for I was being encased in black metal, protective metal. In the dark of the new metal cube that encased me, I felt the door behind me bang and shake terribly, for the false mother was throwing herself violently at the door. She was trying to stab me through the wood with the kitchen knife, but the metal blocked her out.
And then, in the dark of the cube, I clicked the phone again. The greenish light of the display came on and I calmly dialled 911. I spoke with a man, and when I unlocked the key, I heard sirens outside. As I left the bathroom, I saw that my bedroom door with the children was still locked and safely closed, and there were policemen around. They knew what she had tried to do, and they were taking her away.
Then I woke up. What a strange dream. The woman in my dream, when she was enraged, looked a lot like my real mother for a split second, but mostly everything else was different.
